Yes, I'm about to venture into familiar territory for a lot of hardened gamers - I'm going to try and learn Japanese.

Not just so I can play games months before anyone else and understand them, nor so I can justify posters of underage cat-girls on my wall, but I'm hoping to use it to get a rather lucrative job in a the future.

I've had a few vague offers that entail speaking either a Far-Eastern language (I'm presuming they mean Japanese or Chinese) or a Middle-Eastern language and living over there.

I'd rather live in the Far East, personally, so was looking for some advice about getting started with what looks to be a rather difficult language to learn.

As a sidenote, what is more worthwhile trying to learn - Chinese or Japanese? China is the upcoming economic superpower, so it will undoubtedly prove more useful as time progresses. However, I'm probably more partial to Japan as a place to live and work, even if such concerns are at the moment pretty pointless.

I just want to get started on one of the languages basically. I'm starting completely from scratch so I was looking for pointers and things which may be useful, either on the web, on CD or in a text book.

Yeah, I'm preparing myself for a lot of frustration. I like to think I have a bit of a natural capacity for languages - I can speak a few others, some of which were painstakingly self-taught -but they were all "Romance" languages; fairly similar and, most importantly, all romanised.

Japanese and Chinese both look much more daunting from the off. I may self-teach myself the very basics and see what part-time courses there are in my area. I always think the more technical tenses and grammar "stuff" is much easier in a classroom.

I'd love to learn Chinese. I've looked into it in the past, and learnt a few basic phrases, but it's tricky to get hold of. I need to do proper lessons I think, rather than online courses.

EDIT: To make my post actually have some use, I'd say go for Japanese. It's not easy learning a language, so learning one you genuinely want to learn and have an interest in can only help. Worth doing though, can only improve your job prospects.

Kinetic wrote:I've just graduated with a degree in Chinese from Edinburgh and am heading to Taiwan to study for a further year in a couple of days so if you've got any further questions just fire 'em at me!

Hope you'll enjoy learning/living it as much as I have!

Wow, nice. I take it you had to have a decent level of Chinese before the degree? I'd love to do that.

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Nah, the vast majority of degrees nowadays start from scratch. If you've got prior knowledge you can simply skip a year or two.

Parksey, from a "worthwhile" perspective, and at the risk of sounding completely biased, I'd say Chinese is far and away the more useful language. Japan is obviously still a huge market and a very powerful nation but nowadays its influence pales in comparison to its big brother. Depends on what you're interested in and what you want to do though. If you're more interested in Japanese culture, history, etc. then that might be best for you, plus living in China, where the style and quality of living differs hugely from place to place may not be to your tastes, especially if you've never lived in a non-western country before.

From a purely career-orientated perspective, Chinese is the much more useful language, but having Japanese would still reflect very well upon yourself and there are obviously many jobs (though perhaps not as many as you might think) to be had in that area.

In terms of learning, get lessons. Merely learning on your own from a book/dvd/cd-rom, in my experience, simply won't cut it, though I can't speak for Japanese. It will be pretty hard.

Rightey wrote:But there's no such language as Chinese, it's either Cantonese or Mandarin.

It isn't either Cantonese or Mandarin.. There are about 14 sublanguages in the Chinese language family. Chinese is a macrolanguage, much like Arabic. Some people refer to the Chinese variants as dialects, some as languages in their own right.

Whichever you chose, both will end up you learning Kanji, just different versions of it, but with Chinese there seemingly is a hell of a lot more Kanji you need to know as far as I'm aware, I don't really know as I've never really tried. Whichever you learn will be a big help and it can be a hell of a lot of fun.

I can't tell you which one to choose personally as I don't know what you're really into outside of the forum life. If you're interested in the various Japanese cultures Pop and General, then go for that. For a purely business thing though, I'd have to say Chinese is probably the better option. Just go with whatever one you think you'll enjoy the most! I picked Japanese due to my love of both sides of their culture and I just love how it is spoken, where as I can't sit and listen to someone Chinese speak because I personally don't like how it sounds. It's all personal preference.

Personally, I would have thought it would be almost impossible to self learn Chinese. The problem is that is isn't just about the syllables like in western languages, there are four tones. Now, it may be because I'm tone death but I can barely tell the difference between them, and thus, if I try to speak it to my girl friend it just doesn't make sense, even if she knows what I'm trying to say. As an English person I can guess what someone is saying even if the way they pronounce it is off because it sounds roughly the same, but Chinese doesn't have the same margin of error. Maybe it's that you can only speak mandarin if you can sing? Maybe this is why they like karaoke so much? We're through the looking glass here people.

I've wanted to know Mandarin for a long time but I had really bad dyslexia when I was younger and couldn't even read and write in English until I was about twelve. Needless to say, I have not been in a rush to learn a new language. Then again, I recently graduated with a joint degree in English so maybe now is the time to try.

I can't help but think it would be better to start with another Indo-European language though.

Learning Chinese is probably a good move in terms of future employment since China will be the post powerful economy in the world fairly soon.